Zayn Malik’s autobiography, Zayn, comes out today, and in it, the singer reveals that his tenure in One Direction was harder on him than we thought. Zayn wrote that he struggled with an eating disorder while in the group, in addition to the anxiety that he’s spoken publicly about before.

“Something I’ve never talked about in public before, but which I have come to terms with since leaving the band, is that I was suffering from an eating disorder,” a new excerpt from the book reads. “It wasn’t as though I had any concerns about my weight or anything like that, I’d just go for days – sometimes two or three days straight – without eating anything at all. It got quite serious, although at the time I didn’t recognize it for what it was. I think it was about control. I didn’t feel like I had control over anything else in my life, but food was something I could control, so I did.”

He notes that his disordered eating got so bad it started to make him sick: “I had lost so much weight I had become ill. The workload and the pace of life on the road put together with the pressures and strains of everything going on within the band had badly affected my eating habits.”

The more he talks about it, the more Zayn’s departure from One Direction makes sense.